Ethereum’s Merge event has a new start date with the introduction of a revised schedule for testnets and upgrades by network engineers.
Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation said this week that the Merge, Ethereum’s long-awaited shift to a new architecture, may occur the week of September 19.
During The Merge, Ethereum will transition from Bitcoin’s energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus process to the more efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) system. In addition to slashing the network’s energy consumption by 99.5%, some proponents of proof-of-stake claim that switching techniques will provide security and scalability advantages.
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, the price of Ether remains encased in the trading range it has been in since June 13 and is presently encountering resistance at $1,240.
With the Merge still a few months away and nothing more on the plan for Ethereum in the foreseeable future, experts have provided the following warnings.
‘The Merge’ timeline
The Merge is the name of the Ethereum upgrade that aims to replace the existing proof-of-work (PoW) consensus method with a proof-of-participation (PoS) consensus mechanism. This word refers to the connection between Ethereum’s proof-of-work execution layer and its proof-of-participation consensus layer, also known as Beacon Chain.
Beacon Chain, the Proof-of-Stake variant of Ethereum, operates concurrently with the main Proof-of-Work network. As noted by Decrypt, its release in December 2020 marked the beginning of the multi-stage update. In September, the Merge event will essentially transfer the majority of Ethereum’s activity to its PoS chain.
In its tweet, superphiz.eth provided a more comprehensive overview of the project’s future stages, which will include a final test on Ethereum’s newest testnet, Goerli, which is slated to go live in the last week of July.
The proof-of-work-based Sepolia testnet successfully merged with Beacon Chain last week, and immediately before that, the Ropsten testnet successfully merged. Testnets offer a testing environment for developers to try out upgrades and changes prior to implementing them on the Ethereum mainnet.
New “shadow fork” is now active
After the activation of a shadow fork, the news concerning the chronology soon followed. As reported by CoinDesk, the ninth shadow fork of Ethereum went live on Thursday as part of a larger testing effort for the transition to PoS.
This news source states that a shadow fork is a tiny test fork that focuses on one or two minor improvements that should take place when The Merge happens in Ethereum’s main Ethereum protocol. During this ninth update, engineers focused largely on testing the upgrades and releases utilized in the recent Sepolia hard fork “but on a more demanding network,” according to Parithosh, an Ethereum Foundation DevOps engineer.
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